High Court dismisses Afghan relocation challenge in R (CGM) v Secretary of State for Defence

The High Court has dismissed a judicial review challenge brought by an Afghan national against the Ministry of Defence's refusal to grant him eligibility for relocation to the UK under the Afghanistan Response Route, a bespoke scheme created after the 2022 data breach that exposed personal information belonging to tens of thousands of Afghan applicants for the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy.

Mrs Justice Collins Rice heard the claim brought by the individual referred to as CGM, whose application under the wider Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy had previously failed. The Afghanistan Response Route, which operated from April 2024 until its discontinuance in July 2025, was designed for those assessed to be at the highest risk specifically as a result of the data breach, rather than for all individuals at risk generally. Eligibility depended either on having held one of a specified list of high-profile roles, or, as in CGM's case, on a caseworker determining under what was known as condition B(iii) that an applicant held a different high-profile role placing them at equivalent risk.

CGM had served for around three years as part of the Directorate of Protective Service of Government Officials, providing what he described as a second ring of presidential security and acting as bodyguard to a senior general, with training alongside UK and Afghan military forces and involvement in responding to terrorist attacks on government buildings. A caseworker assessed in May 2025 that his role, while genuine, did not amount to a high-profile role comparable to those specifically listed, and that there was insufficient evidence he had been publicly recognised for the work or specifically targeted by the Taliban as a result of it, leading to a finding that he did not meet condition B(iii).

CGM argued first that the decision either misapplied the policy or was irrational, given evidence that his role involved protecting officials from Taliban attacks and that Taliban forces had subsequently sought information from him about the officials he had protected. Mrs Justice Collins Rice rejected this ground, finding the policy required a genuinely high-profile role as a threshold requirement, a question on which decision-makers retained a broad evaluative discretion, and that a personal protection role could rationally be distinguished from the kind of proactive counter-terrorism or strategic activity envisaged by the scheme, even where the individual concerned faced real personal risk from the Taliban for other reasons connected to his access to sensitive information.

CGM's second ground, that the process was procedurally unfair because the entire policy remained secret and subject to a court-ordered super-injunction throughout its operation, also failed. The judge noted the policy had itself anticipated this difficulty by building in a right of review once the data breach became public, but that this right fell away when the scheme was abruptly terminated following an independent review by Paul Rimmer, which concluded the data breach was unlikely to have materially increased individuals' existing risk. Since that report had, in the judge's words, substantially demolished the factual premise underlying the entire scheme, she held that even if the original decision had been flawed, no meaningful remedy could now be fashioned, since there was no longer a sustainable basis on which to compare an applicant's risk against a data breach whose significance had since been shown to be considerably overstated.

The claim was dismissed on both grounds, with the judge distinguishing the case from a challenge to the closure of the scheme itself, which was not before the court and which she considered would face little prospect of success given the findings of the Rimmer review.